Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest, the nudiest day of the primary season edition.

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate. I'm here in Washington by my sweet l lonesome, because John Dickerson,

Slate's chief political correspondent and political director for CBS News, is, of course, in South Carolina,

where we will get a live-on-the-scene report shortly.

And joining us by phone from New Haven is Emily Bazelon, who will also give us a live-on-the-scene report.

Right, because I'm right in the middle on the scene report of the going on.

Right, because I'm right in the middle of all the heat of the private.

At Yale University. We're going to have three topics today. We're going to talk at length and with

enormous pleasure about the goings, the happenings in South Carolina and in the Republican race,

which got so much fun just here in the middle of this week. And then we will

talk secondly about the Keystone pipeline that President Obama blocked, or at least temporarily

blocked this week. And our third topic will be the Sopa PIPA fight over internet piracy that unfolded on the web and in Congress this week, we'll have cocktail chatter, and we're going to have a very, very special announcement that Emily Bazelan will bring us after the end of our first topic.

You sound like a fake ad salesman today.

I know. He's gone into that voice that he used to make fun of me for.

Like they, you know, one day only we have special remnant sales.

I will. I'm trying to buy a mattress this weekend. So maybe I'll practice my, I'm buying a mattress. I'm selling you a mattress.

So, John, this primary campaign, which had gotten, seemed to have gotten kind of boring because everyone thought, oh, it's done.

Romney's won, suddenly got super fun this week.

I don't know if it's any more competitive, but we had just quickly to run through the events.

Amazing fooferra about Mitt Romney's taxes and what tax rate he

pays, uh, with him saying that he pays about 15% of his income and taxes and then talking

about a little bit about how much he earns and his speech income. We'll get to all that in a

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